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Bat dozes through the depths of a Polish winter

By Rowan Hooper

(Image&colon; Lukasz Bozycki/Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2014/bozycki.pl)

THE Puszcza Piska forest of northern Poland is huge, covering some 1000 square kilometres. Hidden amid the wilderness is a network of wartime German bunkers, and in one room, this Daubenton’s bat was found hanging from the ceiling, asleep.

Lukasz Bozycki and his biologist friend Piotr Tomasik were exploring the forest in winter, looking for hibernating bats. It was intensely cold, down to -25 °C. For a week the pair slept in sleeping bags in an unheated wooden house. Then they found the bunkers. Bozycki said it was slightly warmer there, and he found some water he could wash with.

To illuminate the scene, he had Tomasik set a flashlight in the doorway, and trained another on the bat. “By this time, I was shivering so much that it was hard to set up the shot,” Bozycki says.

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But severe hardship – and then worse – was to follow. Their car was a few kilometres away, and Bozycki says it was a huge challenge to trek back to it in the freezing conditions. He contracted pneumonia. Then Tomasik died. “I then abandoned the project,” Bozycki says. “I’d like to dedicate this picture to him.”